Even Death
by rubypop
Summary: The good doctor is next on Reaper's list. Is there a way to bargain for her life? Rape/noncon (MercyKill, implied Gency)


**Even Death**

 _Even death is not to be feared_  
 _by one who has lived wisely._  
\- The Buddha

In order to calm her ever-buzzing mind, Mercy attends to a bedtime ritual: making tea. She picks through the little boxes of leaves that have arrived, one by one, in packages from Nepal, bound in string and knotted with a sparrowhawk feather. She reads over the unpronounceable names with some amusement, at times trying to sound them out — White Prakash, Oolong, Kanchanjangha — and chooses Black Shambali, named for Genji's home in the Himalayan mountains. She shakes the silver-black flakes into a glass kettle, breathing in the liquory bloom of honey and malt.

The ritual helps. She thinks of mindfulness, the steps outlined in Genji's letters. It comes in all flavors: meditative, walking, even steps for eating mindfulness (she imagines him examining a piece of the Swiss chocolate she's sent, taking a whiff, nibbling a corner, all for the sake of spiritual betterment). She sits by the brewing kettle and simply breathes, not thinking of her coming mission to Iraq, the battlefields punctured with explosions and ordinance, the bodies she will pull from the wreckage, the wounds she will heal.

Before she knows it, the tea is done. She pours a cup, blows gently at the steam.

Her apartment in Zürich is modest, compartmental, often empty. She is so rarely in the country these days, and she will be leaving again, for who knows how long? Staying busy, saving lives is the only thing she can do to take her mind off of the past. She shakes her head, remembering the ritual. She tries to clear her thoughts away again and takes a careful sip.

A wave of cold goes through her, goosebumps chasing down her arms, incongruous with the balmy summer night, the hot tea tumbling down her throat. She lowers the cup.

She turns, is still turning when the whorl of blackness behind her rears up, and she drops the teacup onto the table, amber streaks across the sanded birch, and the shadow is gathering, solidifying, resolving itself, and her blaster is out of reach, stashed away with the Valkyrie suit hanging in her bedroom, so she can only rear back, nearly falling from the chair, when the dual barrels of a shotgun level with her face.

She freezes, half-propped by her elbow against the table, tea soaking her sleeve.

The white face stares back over the shotgun, a mask beneath a black hood, soulless cut-out eyes. A horrible flash of recognition twists through her. She tells herself: stay calm. Stay calm. Feeling her heart rate begin to spike.

"Angela," Reaper says, deep voice echoing through the mask.

She manages to raise her eyes from the nose of the shotgun. "Gabriel?" she stammers.

"Gabriel Reyes is dead," he growls.

She swallows hard and does not argue.

"I need something from you. If you'll be so kind."

"It's true, then," Mercy says. "The reports. The black-robed terrorist. But you — you died —"

"You're pushing it, Doc."

Her voice is shaking, despite herself. "What do you want?"

"Names," he says. "Coordinates. I know about the little charity you run. And all the partnerships you've had with members of the old order."

"No," she says at once. Her heart beats faster. The black-robed reaper's kills, the familiar names. She's known, had picked up on the pattern long ago. She tries to swallow and can't force it down.

Reaper pushes the shotgun into her forehead. She smells hot metal, oil, the stink of spent shells.

"What happened to you?" she whispers.

He seizes her then by her shirt, a white silk button-down that tears in his grip, and flings her to the floor. She sprawls, banging her chin on linoleum, and an enormous boot comes down on the small of her back, pinning her down. She gasps.

"Names," he says again. The barrel now grinding into the back of her head. "Coordinates."

She gasps again for air and squeezes her eyes shut from the pain. His foot bears down, crushing her. She balls her fists. Breathe! she tells herself. Calm. Slow. Just breathe!

"I have all night," Reaper says, his voice rumbling low.

"You," she says, inhaling, exhaling a steady stream, "You — you used to call me — Angie —"

He laughs, short, derisive. He grinds down with his heel, a sharp point of pain that makes her cry out. She balls her fists, releases them, tries to relax.

"I know you remember," she says, "that night years ago. Christmas Eve —"

She senses a sudden tension, a stiffness in the weight pressing down on her spine. Hope flutters in her chest. She boosts herself up on her elbows, tries to twist around and look him in the eye.

"It was a mistake," she says with a shaky laugh. "We both called it a mistake. But you remember it, I know you do."

"Shut up," he says.

"Gabriel didn't die. He's right here with me —"

"I said shut up!"

He kicks her hard in the side, sending her spinning against the wall, and she retches, the wind knocked out of her. She cradles her stomach and tries to sit up. He advances, a massive deadly thing radiating anger. He kneels over her and grasps her by the jaw, the points of his armored fingers digging into her throat.

The mask, so close, she sees is scarred, more bone-colored than white, hiding everything, exuding cold.

"Gabriel Reyes," he says, "is dead."

His other hand comes up, the shotgun discarded. He works his thumb beneath the chin of the mask, and his fingers grip. He slides the mask up, back over his head, pushing the black hood away.

Horror again, that horrible recognition.

A corpse's face, she thinks at once. She has seen so many, after all. A face so bloodless, scarred, far more than the death-mask that hid it. The mouth bisected with gashes, waxy eyes devoid of a soul.

The cold coming from him is stronger now, a tang of frost spiking her nose. He breathes — he is breathing — and she catches a glimpse then of something impossible, a flicker of decay, a whiff of rotting meat, and then it is gone again, the white flesh renewed as though nothing has happened.

Spontaneous cellular regeneration. She looks away, feeling sick. She knows that her research has led to this, biotic technology fallen into the wrong hands.

"Look," Reaper growls, forcing her back.

She stares at the resurrected corpse of Gabriel Reyes.

He laughs, just a bit. Wisps of wraithlike black scatter from his face. "How can you look away from this," he says, "when your little experiments produce freaks like Genji Shimada?"

"I saved his life," she says.

"I seem to remember him hating you for it. Though it looks like he's come around."

She looks, unwisely, at the packages of tea.

"A trip to Nepal sounds nice," he muses, and then he grins at her, horribly, an expression so unlike the man she knew that she trembles in his grip.

"He was your ally," she says.

"They all were. Weren't they?"

"You can't do this, Gabriel. I won't let you —"

"I've killed more people than you could ever save."

"I know you're still in there. We can help you. We can undo this."

"This?" He slams her against the wall by the throat and she chokes out a gasp. Spittle flecks his waxen face. "You can undo this? You and your God complex."

He flickers closer, much faster than she expects, and he's much too close now, their faces nearly touching. "I like it better this way," he hisses.

Her heart pounds and pounds. He's going to kill her, she knows, whether she tells him anything or not. And he'll enjoy it, too.

She makes the decision before she can second-guess herself, cradling his shorn head to draw him closer, kissing the cold lips.

He pulls back, his face rewriting with shock.

"I know you remember," she whispers, pulling him back.

Be calm, she thinks. You can handle this.

His mouth on hers chills her. She tastes metal, old blood, as though the scarred lip was bitten long ago. The semblance of Gabriel Reyes is there, but only in the physical form of his lips, his tongue, the shape of his jaw; in his movements and his actions, he is truly someone else.

But still he is human. Tentatively she gropes at the silver buckle of his belt, and her hand grazes his crotch, the hardness that is rising there.

She hesitates. He pulls back, both hands at her jaw now, pressing her to the wall. His eyes flicker to her chest and remain there. She realizes that her silk shirt is torn, had ripped open when he first threw her to the floor. Instinctively she tries to cover herself and he kisses her again, hooking a finger between the cups of her bra and pulling up.

It had been a mistake, that Christmas Eve from years ago. Heady with eggnog, stumbling arm-in-arm from the yearly party. She kissed him first, her thoughts churning with a newly-formed disconnect between the doctor side of her and the woman. She'd let it go too far, this affection, not for the Blackwatch leader she was undressing but the broken man she'd treated for weeks, reassembling piece-by-piece in her lab. Genji Shimada, shredded almost to nothing, blinking vacantly at her from behind his oxygen mask, gripping the bloody sheets. With so many other patients she had maintained that professional distance, but this young man, formerly handsome, maimed to the brink of death, had stirred in her an affection so deep that it stuns her even now.

For so long, Genji hated her. It hurt her deeply, his disgust with the work she had done, the arduous cyberization that had cobbled together a new, less-than-ideal lease on life. Man or machine — which was he more of? He agonized over it, the hours he would pace away at night because he no longer needed sleep, the savagery with which he trained and sparred, the Blackwatch missions that nearly ended in more bloodshed than necessary. And all along she watched him, monitoring vitals, replacing parts and pieces, and her affection grew, deepening into something she was afraid to call love.

She could not bring herself to cross that line. And so that Christmas Eve she sought comfort in Gabriel Reyes, redirecting the molten tide into sexual desire, and he, though surprised, had been willing, even if solely due to the drunken fog that encouraged the both of them.

She knows that this man is nothing like him. She shudders away from his icy mouth at her breast, and he drags her back, biting her fiercely. Tears prick her eyes. His armored fingertips clatter at the buckle of his belt, pulling it free. His pale tongue trails up her neck, a stinging line that ends with another bite, hungry and cold.

"Gabriel," she says, without knowing what else she will say, and he turns her over, one hand gripping viciously at her breast, the other pulling at her skirt, the elastic of her panties.

There is a moment where Mercy begins to doubt if she can go through with this. But he's pressing close, spates of black shadows winding down her arms and her legs, curling from his breath on her ear, and then he's inside of her, that cold stiffness, an invasion into the heat of her body.

It shocks her, this cold. He envelopes her, grasping her neck, her abdomen. The warmth is draining from her, running in rivulets of icy sweat, her flesh erupting with goosebumps at his touch, the hairs on her neck standing on end.

"You," he utters, husky and low, "are warm. Scorching."

His cold tongue again, teeth that test her ear.

He fucks her now, groping at the shreds of her shirt. She can scarcely hold herself up, her arms trembling, and she shuts her eyes again, sinking, awash in the miasma of his atmosphere. He pulls her back up, wrapping her throat in his arm, and she digs at his white bicep, choking.

He eases the pressure with a laugh. "Stay with me, now."

"You're hurting me," she says, and he laughs again. He seizes her hip and grinds into her deeper, to the hilt, and she cries out at the sting of cold that penetrates her core.

"I do remember that night," he says. "I remember your . . . enthusiasm. Where is it now?"

She grits her teeth, and because the tension makes things worse she forces her muscles to ease, to relax into his embrace, and together they lower back to the floor, back to the linoleum that is warmer than her draining flesh.

"So many gifts from our ninja friend," Reaper says, his breath at her ear again. Fingers wind through her hair, and he drags her head back. He gnaws at her neck, pausing to suck a welt into the skin. A jolt runs through her. "I imagine, then, that he wouldn't be very happy with this?"

"He would not care," she mumbles, though the thought of it pains her, oh, how horrible it would be for him to know.

"Only so many monasteries run by those tin cans," Reaper says.

She twists around, and his fist tightens in her hair, holding her there. She doesn't know whether it's a trick of the light, or if the shadow-fumes have confused her, but color seems to be returning to his face, the waxen hue now flushed, if only slightly, with vigor.

"That got your attention," he says with a smirk.

"Don't go near him," she says. "He's nothing to you. He's a simple monk now —"

"I like you when you're riled up. That cool-and-collected act gets old."

"Please, Gabriel."

"Are you begging?"

She nods, her scalp smarting from his grip on her hair. "Gabriel, please," she whispers. "I'm begging you."

He kisses her a final time, stealing the breath from her. She's losing her senses, smothered in this vortex, and the heat is gone from her now, wracking her body with shivers. She's beginning to fade. He whispers against her mouth, "You'll see me again," and she is gone, all of it is gone.

#

Mercy awakes curled up on her kitchen floor. She blinks slowly at the weak morning light and sits up. She only remembers what has happened when the welt on her neck causes her to cringe. She spins around, frantically checking if he is still here. The silence reassures her.

She gets up and teeters slowly to the sanded-birch table. The streaks of spilled tea have long dried. She runs her fingers over them. She savors, for a moment, her returning warmth, confounded by the memory of the reaper's shadow. That was not her work, that created them. No. Even if she were responsible for him — for the methods that have ripped him back into the world of the living — she cannot comprehend what technology has disrupted his resurrection, and given him command over shadows.

The boxes of tea lie scattered across the floor. She does not remember them being knocked over. She's almost finished tidying them up when she realizes that one is missing. The box of Black Shambali, the photo of the monastery printed on its face. She drops the boxes in her arms. Leaves scatter across the floor, black flakes, silver needles and gold tips, and with them are breaths of vanilla and baked fruit, sparked flint, a lingering cold that chills her to the bone.

###


End file.
